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Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Countries with independence days" aka former colonies.
Well I understood that much, but I'm not sure what link it could have with the shape of the x, especially since the English don't do it the same way as India.
> Only й and э require two strokes Wouldn't the ф as well? > [for the x], I draw two mirrored c’s Isn't that what everyone is doing, or are we Frenchmen the exception? For reference if the author reads this, we write the latin x exactly like the cyrillic х, i.e. reverse c, bottom-left to top-right diagonal, normal c.
Some person recognized a problem they wanted solved and put a bunch of effort into creating a unique solution.
I love this stuff.
This post is perfect for HN.
I had some friends who worked on this for a while but didn't get far with it. It turns out it's tricky to design a general purpose system that adapts to users' handwriting idiosyncrasies and is fast enough to work in real time with handwriting with sufficient accuracy.
Some of that work is still visible in the ChromeOS virtual keyboard handwriting mode, but it's very limited - one line at a time. https://cursive.apps.chrome/ (the built-in note-taking app on Chromebooks) has some interesting inking gestures for manipulating written words, but doesn't have any semantic-level understanding.
I am not sure what country the author is in, because when I learned to write English in school (decades ago, and it was the language of instruction) very few letters required backtrack, pretty much only ‘i’ and ‘j’. I just looked at an image of the US Declaration of Independence and the same is true (the ‘t’ has a wiggle in the middle). Other languages are similar: for German if you look at either Kurrent or Sütterli…
I like writing in cursive, but I don’t see backtracking as a problem. I backtrack quite a lot in Cyrillic, even in Russian, e.g. I always underline ш and write a line over т (which looks like m) to distinguish them (otherwise they look quite similar, see the famous example лишили лилии — you might want to google it if you haven’t seen it yet). I also normally write д as ∂, which breaks the flow. Belarusian Cyrillic r…
>I always underline ш and write a line over т (which looks like m) to distinguish them Having studied Russian in college, I assumed that all Cyrillic script included a line over the т, because otherwise readability goes to hell. Is my impression here based on (a) an opinion of my Russian prof expressed as a universal rule or (b) a thing that's universal in Russian specifically, but not Belarusian Cyrillic or other si…
what you said about mixing up cursives is really interesting! I think the only case where I mix up mine is when writing a p instead of an р (the russian version typically doesn't have a loop).
Wondering how many people are like me and hate writing in cursive. I stopped using it right after graduating high school (where it was required), never used in drafts after elementary school, and only ever used normal print letters in the university (and also included TeX commands because I was typesetting lecture notes later and was figuring out the optimal command set on the fly).
I’m surprised, as the whole points of it are speed and duration (less cramping, less energy when moving the wrist). Discrete lettering is simply slower because it requires more motion.
Latin Sütterlin ( https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ausgangsschrift#/media/Datei:S... ) has an x without backtracking. At first it looks a bit weird with the two loops, but I think they are exaggerated for didactical reasons. If you train a bit you can make it look like an x by making the loops thinner. Put differently, this is the "opposing c's"-method, without lifting the pen between the two c's.
